Emboldened by their Dada apprenticeship, the
Surrealists were not shy about publicizing their views.
From the splash of Tzara’s surprise Paris debut at the
First Friday of Littérature in 1920 to the group’s presence
on the barricades in May ’68, these boys liked
shouting it from the rooftops and taking it to the
streets—the streets that, said Breton, “could test like
nowhere else the winds of possibility.”
In the fall of 1924, as Breton and a knot of likeminded
malcontents tried to give a name to the (as
they termed it) “vague” current that had been preoccupying
them for several years, the question of publicity
became paramount. Surrealism, whatever else one
might say about it, was also a product, a concept to be
marketed to as many receptive consumers as it could
reach. And, as with most products, its launch was
threatened by an assortment of obstacles: limited
media access, the public’s resistance to novelty, even a
rival creation—specifically, the Apollinaire-tinted brand of Surrealism
promoted by Yvan Goll and Paul Dermée. In this light, the flurry
of activity
that accompanied the movement’s premiere, including the broadside
A
Corpse and the first issue of La Révolution surréaliste,
stands as nothing so
much as a vast advertising campaign, with the Manifesto
of Surrealism as
its lead press release. Like Tzara before him, who had pushed Dada to the
front of the avant-garde pack just after the war, Breton intended both
to
spread the word far and wide and to knock the competition on its ear.
Breton’s works abound in references to the attention-grabbing artifacts
and slogans of the modern world, as purveyors of the marvelous: the huge
billboard for Mazda light bulbs (not simply because of its consonance with
Nadja), the “modern mannequin” evoked in the Manifesto, and
the humble
painted signs for wood and coal are only a few examples. Since the
beginning of his poetic adulthood, he had looked for ways to break language
out of the cloister into which it had been shut by literary preciousness,
and he saw advertising as one such means. “What is it that poetry
and
art do?” he had written to Louis Aragon in April 1919. “They
extol.
Extolling is also the aim of advertising.” And that same month: “Naturally,
we must take the word advertising in the widest sense…Christianity
is an
advertisement for heaven.” Like dream condensation, Isidore Ducasse’s
reworking of old maxims, or the surprise detours of automatic writing,
thebest advertisements reconfigure the familiar into something recognizable
but different, revivifying both language and its object and making them
new. Breton later remarked that he’d wanted to compose “an
advertisement
for heaven” (in the Manifesto he added: “or for hell”)
that would be “striking
enough, convincing enough” to make everyone commit suicide.

—

MARK POLIZZOTTI is the author of Revolution of
the Mind: The Life of André
Breton, and has translated works by Breton, René Daumal, Jean
Echenoz, Maurice
Roche, Marguerite Duras and others. His other books include Lautréamont
Nomad, The New Life: Poems, the collaborative novel S., and a study of
Luis
Buñuel’s Los Olvidados for the British Film Institute. A
monograph on Bob
Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited will be published later this year.